Sunday

Mar 30, 2014 at 12:00 AM

Don Bousquet turned 66 on St. Patrick’s Day, and, as of today, he’s retiring from one of his most visible platforms — doing two cartoons a week for The Providence Sunday Journal. He’ll continue drawing, but is winding down.

I expected Don Bousquet’s home to be a showcase of cartoons. He’s been drawing them professionally for more than 30 years, and his quirky depictions of all-things-Rhode Island have made him a local legend.

Instead, his walls are covered with hundreds of aerial photos of the state.

He explains that he loves Rhode Island, airplanes and photography. He’s even in business with a son taking those aerials. He got his photo skills in the Navy — which was before he became a private investigator once assigned to tail a Johnston mobster. For real.

I’ve known Don Bousquet for years — we did two books together, including “The Rhode Island Dictionary” — and I’d assumed he was always a cartoonist. But that didn’t start until age 32, and his life had some interesting twists beforehand.

It took a big decision of his to give me an excuse last week to stop by and ask about his career.

Don Bousquet turned 66 on St. Patrick’s Day, and, as of today, he’s retiring from one of his most visible platforms — doing two cartoons a week for The Providence Sunday Journal. He’ll continue drawing, but is winding down.

He and his wife, Laura, live, of course, in South County — the spiritual heart of the Rhode Island he likes to portray in his cartoons. Put it this way — he draws a lot of quahoggers. He met Laura at Chariho High, went to the University of Rhode Island, and for decades, the two lived year-round in Bonnet Shores, surrounded by seasonal homes.

They now live in a townhouse in South Kingstown. The lower level looks over conservation woods. That’s where Bousquet does his drawing. It’s also where he builds and maintains model airplanes — including a remote-controlled one with a nose-mounted camera for the aerial-photo business.

He’s like a kid on the subject, and was soon talking about the Navy assigning him to photograph the restoration of the plane that flew the Atlantic even before Lindbergh and …

I cut him off and said I first wanted to know how he got into cartooning.

He gave a half-smile — he seems to always have one — and said it began with an incident in Spanish class at Chariho High.

Mr. Gizzarelli — real name — was the teacher, known for parting his hair unfashionably down the middle. Bousquet was known for his doodling.

One day, he says, “Gizz” was late and the other students egged Bousquet on to draw a caricature of the guy on the blackboard. He took the challenge and drew Gizz with an arrow pointing to the part and these words in Spanish: “La carrera de las pulgas.”

“Everyone had to look it up,” says Bousquet. “It was one of the biggest laughs I ever got. It means, ‘The highway of the fleas.’ ”

Gizz sent Bousquet to the principal, but later came down and said he’d only done it to keep order — in fact, he was both amused and impressed. So was the principal. Bousquet later did caricatures of teachers and administrators for the Chariho yearbook.

“So I thought, ‘I’d like to make a living like that,’ ” Bousquet recalls. “But then I got drafted.”

It was 1968. He ended up in the Navy.

“Instead of sending me to Vietnam,” he said, “they made me a photographer.”

He was based in Washington, D.C., and did a lot of airplane photography, which suited him; he’d been a plane nut since growing up near the air park in Richmond, R.I. His father was a janitor and his mother an office worker, both at URI. Bousquet is one of seven children. His brother Steve was a reporter for Channel 10, and now is one of Florida’s top political reporters as state house bureau chief for the Tampa Bay Times.

Despite Don’s plane obsession, he wasn’t a pilot. Nor, after his Navy discharge, was he confident enough to try cartooning. So he went job hunting.

He gave his half-smile.

“When I got out of the Navy,” he says, “guess what I did for a living? Ever hear of James Bond? I was Rhode Island’s closest thing to that — I became a private investigator for the Pinkerton International Detective Agency.”

That’s the same one that chased Butch Cassidy.

They hired Bousquet in part because he knew photography. One of his first assignments was “employee” in a factory just over the Connecticut line, finding out who was stealing some of what he calls “the goods.”

“I went to work undercover in a sanitary-napkin company,” Bousquet says. “This is the gospel truth. Working in shipping and receiving. And I solved the case.”

An insider, he says, was working with an outside trucker.

Later, Bousquet was assigned to follow a Johnston man because a company the guy was working for had questions about how he was spending his time. The guy happened to be a well-known mobster.

Bousquet parked near his house in his Mustang convertible and waited.

“I was sitting out there forever in a three-piece suit with a .38 special in a shoulder holster.” He had a license to carry through his Navy training. “I’m sitting there for hours, and someone calls the state police — ‘There’s someone suspicious in a Mustang.’ The state police come by. ‘Sir what are you doing?’ ”

Bousquet showed his Pinkerton license.

“Oh,” said the statie. “You’re on a case. And yes, I know that guy.”

Eventually, the mobster’s car pulled away, with Bousquet on its tail. Soon, the car started to zigzag, then headed to the police station. Turns out it was the mobster’s wife, reporting someone was following her. Bousquet hadn’t been too discreet.

The state police, Bousquet recalls, stepped in and called Pinkerton, saying, “You got a bozo out here chasing a woman around instead of the mobster.”

He stayed with Pinkerton a while longer, then got a job at Vocational Resources in Providence finding jobs for people with emotional challenges, ranging from professionals who’d had breakdowns to those with disorders. He did it for six years and found it rewarding.

Laura was teaching library science at Exeter-West Greenwich High School. She said he should go for it — he didn’t want to look back at age 65 wishing he’d have tried.

Bousquet gave his company notice and said he was going to be a cartoonist. He recalls they laughed. He doesn’t blame them.

“When I look at the early stuff I did,” he says, “what was I thinking?”

Soon after he left the job, he learned he had less time to succeed than he thought. Laura was pregnant.

“You can’t have a baby with a non-working father,” Bousquet says.

He began by driving to the Newport headquarters of a new publication called “Rhode Island Magazine” — different from today’s well-known Rhode Island Monthly. He showed some cartoons and the editors called in other staff to take a look.

“They were laughing,” Bousquet recalls. “They said, ‘We’ll buy two of them. In fact, we’ll buy two every month.’ ”

He recalls they paid around $50 each — but it was a start. He feels those early cartoons were pretty good. He gives the half-smile again.

“They were good enough to put the magazine out of business within a year.”

But it gave him confidence to knock on other doors. Something else gave him that same confidence — his work at Vocational Resources. Bousquet admits he’s shy, but the job-placement work taught him to reach out. He says he’s lucky he didn’t try to be a cartoonist in his early 20s.

“If I’d done it then and failed, that would have been it. I was a callow youth.”

He adds: “I think more people later in life could be successful doing their dream job if they go through that maturing process. Maybe you have to be 50 to be ready. In my case I was 32.”

Within a month, his cartoons were running in the Westerly Sun, Narragansett Times and Providence Journal.

He tried The New Yorker, too. He liked the $800 per cartoon they paid at the time. But it wasn’t a match, and it taught him the value of sticking to his own style.

“Don’t try to be a sophisticated Manhattan cartoonist if you’re not,” he says.

He points out one other insight that made a huge difference.

“In the early days,” he says, “I was trying to please people. I was thinking, ‘This is what they want to see.’ Over the years it changed to what I like — something that makes me laugh, makes me smile. That’s where I think I found my niche.”

He feels it’s the key to success in many areas.

“Don’t pander to other people,” says Bousquet. “Don’t do what people expect you to do. Do what you want to do, and that’s usually the best work you can do.”

He guesses that 60 percent of his work is about Rhode Island, but he was also in Yankee Magazine for 25 years and has done national publications, including Reader’s Digest. And he does commercial work for companies such as Cardi’s and Big Blue Bug Solutions.

He did his first collection in 1982 at age 34 and has now done more than 20 books, which account for about half of what he takes in.

The two of us did “The Rhode Island Dictionary” in 1993. We did many book signings together, and I soon learned his celebrity status. I still remember arriving first at a few and people asking when Don Bousquet would get there.

He was an amusing seat-mate at signings, with every other comment being a half-joke. Of course, he had an ear for local dialect. If we were due at Barnes & Noble, he’d always say something like, “Meetcha at the Bons and Nobles.”

I also saw his business side — he and his wife took over distribution of the books, and in his dry, low-key way, he pushed to get into a range of outlets, such as Benny’s.

When I asked where he gets his ideas, he said it’s a mystery. He can do advertising work on demand since it’s specific, but thinking of cartoons out of the blue can be hard.

“Some days,” he says, “I’ll wake up and I’m bone dry and I’ll know it pretty soon. That’s the day I’m throwing papers on the floor. Other days — the muse is there.”

After a few rough drafts, when he’s clear on what the image should be, the final cartoon only takes from 10 to 40 minutes to draw.

If you ask him about individual cartoons, the source of the idea does become evident, as in one showing three mid-aged women standing like plants in a garden in front of a sign that says, “Mums.” Yes, he remembers passing such a sign and it hit him.

We looked at a cartoon showing the last concrete block being put in place at the new Jamestown bridge. He’d seen a headline about it and an idea came to him: Bousquet’s concrete block has a mobster’s pinstripe-clad leg and shiny shoe hanging out.

Then there’s one of his classics — a state trooper in a bathing suit with thighs bulging out like their uniform pants.

But even when the inspiration is clear, you realize most people wouldn’t have thought of it, and it speaks of one of his best cartoonist assets: a personality that views everything with dry humor.

I asked why he decided to retire from his main weekly platform, The Sunday Journal.

He says it began with cataract surgery that improved his vision to 20-20, but took away his close-up clarity, and got him thinking about slowing down. He felt it was a good time to stop because his ideas were still coming strong.

Why would that make sense?

“I don’t want to get to a point of fading away,” he says, “or for people to say, ‘Yeah, that guy used to make me laugh.’ ”

The Journal offered to run past cartoons, at least for a while — and pay him for them. He turned that down because behind that wry smile, he’s also the kind of strong-willed Swamp Yankee he often portrays in cartoons. Bousquet worried people would say, “What’s going on, can’t he think of anything new?”

So after 34 years in The Journal, the cartoons running today will be his last.

He says he’ll still do specialized cartooning for businesses and some other periodicals. He’s also working on two more collections, one about driving in Rhode Island.

And he’ll continue helping his son Nathan, 33, run “Don Bousquet and Son Aerial Photography.” Much of their work is for real-estate agents who like the lower-altitude images.

In addition, they’ve taken about 200,000 aerials of Rhode Island landscapes and landmarks. Bousquet, who’s been a history buff since URI, likes to record state vistas and buildings for posterity. The two mostly focus on South County — he explains it would be harder to do it in cities because of obstacles.

Bousquet’s other son, Mike, 29, is in retail. Bousquet and Laura have one granddaughter, Norah, 15 months. That’s another reason he’s winding down a bit — to spend time with family.

I asked if he was in the mood to do any cartooning today. He showed me a rough drawing he’d done that morning of his latest idea. It was an image of a typical overweight Bousquet character with a back-up camera just above his rear end.

He says there’s a chance he’ll come up with another before the day is done.

Which is to say Don Bousquet, legendary cartoonist, is indeed winding down.

But he’s not done yet.

CORRECTION: The original version of this story put Don Bousquet's brother Steve at the wrong newspaper. Also, in the original version Mr. Gizzarelli's name was misspelled.

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